Behind the Scenes of the Doctor Who Christmas Special 2023 ✨ BBC

Behind the Scenes of the Doctor Who Christmas Special 2023 ✨ BBC

Welcome to the Christmas Special! This was like, number one on my shopping list, Christmas Day. I’m just so happy to see you all again. Oh my God, I’ve missed a Christmas Special. The whole place just looks stunning. It’s very exciting to wind Christmas in, to weave it into the show properly. And that’s how I got my name. Ruby, named after Ruby Road. We love Ruby Sunday. Ruby Sunday is the latest in a long line of companions but, as ever, bringing a brand new energy to… whatever the actor brings to it.

We’ve got Millie Gibson stepping into this role, bringing her energy. Okay… We meet Ruby Sunday in an interview with Davina McCall. Marker. A mark. She’s applied onto her show, just to see if she can find some traces of any DNA from her mum and dad. I can’t promise miracles.

She’s not searching for her birth parents through any need, through any weakness, through any loss, but she’s strong enough to do it. She’s got all those ingredients that say; “I’m missing something” and then the Doctor enters her life and everything

Starts to close around that, revolve around the Doctor. Ow! (LAUGHS) I love a family with a companion, you might have noticed. She’s got an adoptive mother, Carla. Smile! Carla fostered her then adopted her. They found each other. And when that happens you’re really blessed

To find somebody else that you can love so much. So, I think they really hold on to that and hold on to each other. She’s got a great backstory. She’s got an unusually big backstory for a companion. Ruby was found on a church step, in the snow when she was a baba.

She’s been abandoned by her mother and it’s really heartbreaking. Who is her mother? That’s going to be a tremendous spine to the series. Who’s the mother? Who’s the father? Why was she abandoned? How was she left there? Huge plots to come about this!

There’s a proper youth to her, it’s like, we often… television often invents 18 year old characters and casts someone who’s 28. And Millie genuinely is that age and I think you get a real buzz off her. I got most of it except I

Dropped the eggs which is a really big problem because the shops close, for all of one day. She’s very experienced, Millie’s very experienced. She’s done years of ‘Coronation Street’. And yet, I think nothing quite prepares you for a show that puts you with

Monsters and snowstorms and goblins and madness. Did you just hiss at me? Yes, goblins. I thought goblins at Christmas. It’s partly the freedom that the Toymaker has brought to Doctor Who where by bringing Neil Patrick Harris in as the Toymaker, there’s an element of the supernatural coming into it. Or at least things that don’t

Play, or pretend to play by hard science fiction rules. That’s why Doctor Who has avoided goblins and elves. The Toymaker has just relaxed the rules slightly where you’ll see more of this. It allows me to bring in a floating ship. No one sits there watching and goes…

“How’s that ship floating?” You just don’t. It’s Doctor Who. The idea with the goblins has always been a CG-prosthetic amalgamation hybrid. Give him a little scratch on his elbow. So yeah, we take what Neill’s done and Millennium have done.

We move that into our world. Starting with a 3D scan as a base so, we’re staying true to their design. Something that’s really hard to do, if you’re doing it animatronically is build a nuance of movement and muscularity in the face that makes it feel real. (SNARLING)

So, in CG we just have infinite control over that stuff. We actually have teams of sculptures that sculpt all the different facial expressions that the goblins might do and the wrinkles that appear when that happens and the muscular twitching. And they’re bought in to create a…

What we call a FACS, a ‘facial animation rig’ to be able to give the animators control, to pull them around and do what they want to do. The realities of the production are that you can only have 12, 15, 20 extras on that day. You might choose to take that small group of crowd and then swap clothes and move them around and join them together in post to make it look like a bigger crowd. You don’t notice the fact that there are goblins that are the same, but if

You go back through it, then you might see that there are. Hiya. You tend to start with the song when there’s a song in the episode. It always has to be done prior to filming so you’ve got a leg up really, once you’ve done the song. We’re in the Cardiff Millennium Centre and we are recording music with the National Orchestra of Wales. You might have painful memories, as soon as you start, of aching fingers and and puffed out cheeks and lungs. That’s all back. It’s quite early. So, I recorded a lot of music. I did some work on theme, I did some music for the Christmas Special. It’s really, mostly, a dialogue between myself and Russell. There’s so many elements to what is being recorded so it’s a lot of electronic instruments

As well. So, this is the orchestral part of lots of different pieces. So, it’s building a big jigsaw puzzle really. There is this really, really fun song that is sung by some goblins, while they’re about to eat a baby. I think Russell’s always wanted to just make Doctor Who as musical as possible. And see, he’s really enjoying doing that. He’s just really gleeful about it. If this was the Daleks it would be a really odd episode. Or if it was the Cybermen singing, you’re going… “Okay you’ve gone too far now.” But with goblins, it just works. So, it’s taken a long time to find the right setting and the right tone.

See, it’s a bit of a romp and so a song fits that and it’s Christmas Day. It’s taken a long time to get all the right pieces in the right place to say; “Yes, you can have a song in this episode.”

Mark Tonderai called me up and he wanted to just have a little bit of a sense of that rhythmic, stamping your feet on the ground… a gang working together. And then Russell brought the ‘Aladdin’ element into all of it and said; “I can hear some influence from ‘Aladdin’ in this.”

So, I basically tried to bring the two ideas together in some way that was comprehensible and made some kind of sense out of the material and hopefully, you know, both influences are there. Ugh! Oof! Hurgh? Eergh? Cut there! Well done.

So, today we are filming a scene where I pull a goblin ship down from the sky and save baby Ruby. Ncuti has this remarkable moment at the end – Spoiler alert! Where he jumps off the roof of the church spire. Yeah, it’s exciting. I get to use these for the first time.

My magic gloves. Intelligent gloves. That helps me pull down the goblin ship and save time. I’m loving the snow, although it’s not real snow because we don’t really see snow at Christmas do we? But it’s beautiful. Night shoots… but, it is what it is.

We have these ridiculous machines that kick out soap foam that’s like snow. We built the top of the set here in the studios. So, that’s obviously going to be on a controlled set. We haven’t got to worry about the weather. It is strange, like, when scenes are fragmented.

You might shoot part of it in a studio. You might shoot part of it on a location. Woohoo! It’s always beautiful when you see it come together and you’re like… “Oh my God, it all just flows so nicely.” Wahey! It’s very, very cool. I love them. I love doing stunts.

Let us know when you’re ready, boys. Here we go. Three, two, one, action! Ugh! I love feeling like an action hero. Ncuti, how are you feeling? Fresh!

Go behind the scenes of the #DoctorWho Christmas Special 2023… The Church on Ruby Road #iPlayer

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